Sugar and Spice_ An L.A. Candy Novel - Lauren Conrad [47]
“O-kay.” Liam cocked his head. “What kind of surprise? My birthday’s not till September, you know?”
“It’s not a birthday surprise. It’s a different kind of surprise. Just be patient, please? I promise I’ll tell you soon.”
“You’d better.” Liam slid his arms around her waist and hugged her again. Scarlett crammed the envelope into the back pocket of her jeans as she nestled in closer, hugging him back. She couldn’t believe he had come this close to seeing the return address on the envelope. She had hidden it on the CD shelf yesterday, quickly and carelessly (obviously), because it was on the coffee table and Jane had almost picked it up.
It was Scarlett’s first acceptance letter, from Columbia University in New York City. She had danced a little victory dance around the apartment when she read it. Then grown very subdued when she realized that she had a choice now. She could leave USC this fall if she wanted to.
The problem was, she didn’t want to leave Liam. Or Jane.
What was she going to do?
Chapter 17
The Perfect Guy
As Jane drove out of the underground parking garage of her apartment building on Tuesday morning, she spotted four—no, five—cars pulling away from the curb. Paparazzi. The tinted windows and absence of plates were telltale signs, not to mention that these same five cars had been following her almost every day the past few weeks. She thought one of them might be the creep that had bumped her car from behind when she was on her way to meet up with Braden.
It was so odd . . . these men, whose names she didn’t even know, followed her all day long. (And presumably the other L.A. Candy girls, too. Scarlett had been complaining bitterly about the ones tailing her around town.) They “accompanied” Jane when she went to work, dropped off her dry cleaning, shopped for groceries at Whole Foods—and of course, when she filmed. There seemed to be more and more of them at the PopTV shoots lately, particularly the outdoor shoots. Dana and Trevor were not happy about this for a couple of important reasons. First, the paparazzi often wandered into the frame and scenes had to be reshot. The PopTV crew got into frequent, sometimes violent arguments with the paps about this, and just last week, the network had to replace several expensive digital cameras that had been broken during a tussle in order to avoid a lawsuit. Second, the photos were sold to the tabloids, and they documented the girls’ activities, outfits, and so forth in a slightly different, more accurate way than the show. Whereas Trevor took liberties with editing—say, patching together two scenes from a month apart into one “seamless” scene that pretended to take place on the same day—the gossip rags could print images of these events as they really happened. Magazines were getting more savvy about this sort of thing, as was the public. Which made Trevor and the other network execs extremely tense.
Jane continued driving down the street, stopped at the stop sign, and made a left. She watched in the rearview mirror as each of the five cars turned left behind her. Three of them didn’t even bother to heed the stop sign. She was on her way to film a quick scene at a café in West Hollywood with Hannah, after which she had an eleven o’clock meeting at the office with Fiona (off camera), after which she had a lunch date with Caleb in Beverly Hills (on camera). She wasn’t thrilled with the idea of showing up at the café shoot with a party of five—or more, since sometimes, there was more than one pap per car, or alternatively, once she showed up at a location with a group of them in tow, more would magically show up, easily doubling or tripling their number. Really, it was insane.
A few minutes later, Jane reached Sunset Boulevard. Since the incident en route to Braden’s in late March, she had gotten savvier. She had learned through experience that making a bunch of quick turns didn’t lose them; it simply made them drive more recklessly and ignore obstacles like red lights and pedestrians. She had also grown to appreciate stop-and-go traffic, especially on